Speed Trap

You know you are having a bad day if you get to work late because of a speeding ticket that costs you two hundred and sixty-three dollars and five points off your license leaving you just one more point. All the speed limits around your house are incredibly slow. You have trouble always going the legal limit. The cop who pulls you over takes an elaborate amount of time taking care of his business making you late for yours.

At work it doesn’t get any better. You get yelled at once you do arrive for coming in late when you usually never miss mornings and besides you have been with the firm for more than a few years and do not deserve scolding like some pimply intern. Soon you learn what all the over reaction is about. If when you get to work and after the talking to, you find the system is down and everything you and your team have been working on for the last two months was lost, well it’s time to start wondering how bad it can really get.

It doesn’t take you too long to find out. The whole floor, from the section boss down to your pretty inept secretary (she’s a very pretty girl without the ability to operate a computer) are running around mad; pissed off and insane. People are all pointing fingers but after a while more and more fingers are getting pointed in your direction. You try to take control of the situation but no one is listening or reacting rationally. They all know someone will have to pay for this huge mistake so they are putting up defenses. If it was up to you, you would fire the secretary and get someone competent. You don’t care what she would look like if she could get the job done, or better still not fuck up the job like you suspect Ms. Long Lashes might of done on this one.

You have to call your wife and tell her you will miss the romantic dinner planned for tonight that was supposed to be a celebration of your fifth wedding anniversary; a dinner that was going to be at home with just good simple food, expensive wine and candles, but you will miss it because now you have to stay late and figure a way out of the mess. The deadline is in ten days. At least your wife Sally, bless her heart, didn’t seem too upset.

Then in a simple twist of fate you get to go home on time anyway because when the regional boss hears of the problem he fires you. You get a termination e-mail that leaves you as blank as the program holding all the work that you did. The blame falls unfairly right on top of you.

You are let go from the job you didn’t like and leave unappreciated. You only stayed on with the firm because Sally wanted to live in the nice neighborhood of San Palo. This job that you just lost was a piece of shit but it paid the wage that keep Sally in the comfort that she desired. She got to keep up with all her friends at the local strip mall, got to drive the car she wanted and was able to take the week holiday on the cruise ship that was en vogue every year.

You go home from this bad, bad day making sure you drive the speed limit and you stop off to get a bouquet of flowers. It is time for some loving. When you get to your nice house in the quiet suburb you find your best friend Mark’s car parked in your spot. You hope that Mark doesn’t want to stay too long. Tonight you feel like being alone with Sally. It is your anniversary after all. You won’t even tell her about work until tomorrow. You don’t want to spoil the evening.

When you walk inside you hear distinct noises. You don’t want to believe what you hear but deep inside you know that the grunting, groaning, and bare flesh slapping against bare flesh to be nothing less than the sounds of carnal knowledge applied at high volume. When you turn the corner you get a visual confirmation of your worst fears. It takes a few seconds for the facts of the situation to fully register but when they do finally come into clear focus you feel completely wrecked. Who can blame you? You have just come home from a bad day at work only to find your best friend fucking your wife and drinking the expensive wine.

Mark is pumping away and dear Sally has the look of ecstasy on her face, kinda like a chipmunk sucking on its teeth. She has beads of sweat on her brow despite the cool blowing air conditioning and her tits are jumping all over the place like Mexican jumping beans as she moves up and down on Mark’s stiff member.

Even if this wasn’t your wife and best friend the picture holds nothing in the way of exotic pleasure. Both Sally and Mark are about thirty pounds over weight. Sally has gathered her cellulite all around her ass after gallons of fat free ice cream sundaes and Mark has developed his beer belly after copious amounts of light beer from Miller. This isn’t really a judgment against them, you yourself don’t look so good naked in front of a mirror. All three of you have had a great time eating and drinking together but you sure don’t have an appetite right now. Never in a million years did you think today would turn out to be this bad.

If this happens to you, if you walk into your house to catch your wife fucking your best friend chances are things aren’t going to get better anytime soon. The bad day is not going to end. You can pretty much bet your life savings life won’t be the same again for awhile, at least not for a long time.

Maybe a slap in the face was needed to force a change in you. Had you become too comfortable with your lot in life? Lord knows you made sacrifices but wasn’t growing old together and not having to worry about silly flirtations and painful infidelity the reason you took your vows? Wasn’t that the goal you both set out for, to try and reach something resembling marital bliss? Wasn’t it the reason you waited at the end of the isle five years ago?

Maybe you are the cause of this, maybe not. You thought you did enough. Maybe life is shit and you are getting a class A lesson tonight. Whether the change was needed or not it never feels good. It pretty much feels worse than anything else in the world. You don’t even have anybody to call since the only people you talk to are rubbing each other raw and are the cause of all this friction in the first place.

When this happens, your best friend and wife fucking each other, and it does happen more readily then we all care to admit, but maybe just not so much on wedding anniversaries, but we don’t always hear about it because those who it does happen to don’t like to talk about it for obvious reasons, who can blame them, anyway if you do find yourself in this situation there is not much you can do. You can throw up, cry like a baby, scream a full scale of obscenities or threaten violence, but in the end they are all extremely embarrassing and somewhat out of character.

You walk out of the house wondering why you never fucked your wife in that position and wishing you knew how the expensive wine you paid for was. You get in your car and drive without a direction. You can also drive fast without paying much attention to the speed limits and before you know it the small town cops have got you again but this time you don’t feel like pulling over because you are no longer in your thirties, you are over weight and you really loved your wife. At least you loved her in the way love is to you. Hell, maybe you didn’t know what love is and if this is so maybe it won’t hurt so much in a few weeks time. You wish you could time travel to a place where it no longer hurts so bad, somewhere where time has healed the wound.

Being fat and heading into soft middle age doesn’t leave you much options in the love department, what you think love is, what romance novelists think love is, whatever. No one is as cool as in the movies, this you learned a long time ago. No need to pretend that life is anything but the things that happen to you. You can’t remember the last time a person looked at you in an affectionate way. You know you are heading into a time of being alone. You are not yet sure if this time will be lonely.

If your wife suddenly or maybe not so suddenly decides to rip her clothes off and make it with your best friend, very recently no friend at all, there is no readily available explanation that comes to mind. Nothing jumps out at you as a reason. Mark was the short stop on the softball team and you were the catcher but you don’t think that gives him the right to seduce Sally into gymnastic positions and force chipmunk expressions on her cherub face. Especially on your wedding anniversary when just five short years ago he was the one who handed you the ring.

So you step on the gas, put the petal to the metal like you did in high school when you where in your teens and had a twenty-eight inch waist and smoked cigarettes because you just didn’t care. This is the time when you wore silk shirts with rodeo riders on them and velvet pants. Your hair was slicked back with axle grease. You are not sure if your look was in fashion back then, or if it ever was, but it made you feel wild and hip, cool and funky free. That’s all that mattered.

You take the cop on a chase down back allies and around sharp turns. You lead the cop through the nice neighborhood that is probably seeing it’s first high speed chase since the Nixon administration. You hardly notice the lights flashing red and blue like Fourth of July fire works and the siren wailing the desperate song of the damned. When you crank the car and spin around on two wheels the cop can no longer keep up the hot pursuit and smashes into one of the neighborhood swimming pools. You make your way to the freeway. You get on going north, then head east. After about one hundred miles you are out in the desert heading to Las Vegas.

There is no sign of any other cops following you. You pull over into a small gas station. It is run down and almost looks deserted but there is a light on and no tumbleweeds are blowing by. On the way into the rickety station you take your tie off and throw it into the rusty forest green garbage bin. Inside you loosen your collar, you buy a carton of Lucky Strikes, a six pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth, and a deck of cards with girls on the back. Even though you are headed to Vegas you don’t plan on doing too much gambling, not with your luck. The cards are for solitaire.

Walking out of the station you look up at the vast desert sky and all the millions of stars out tonight that you couldn’t even begin to count and it makes you feel insignificant but it also makes all the events of the last few hours seem to not really matter. In all that open space with all those twinkling stars there has to be some order to the universe that doesn’t have to be comprehensible in the least. You decide to look up more at night.

You get back on the interstate, open a beer, light a cigarette and rev the engine. It feels good to be driving in the desert with the wind through your hair and troubles left behind. It’s too soon to tell what tomorrow will bring but right now there is freedom. One thing is for sure, you won’t be late for work.